5 Giant City-Wide Parties You Won't Believe Are Real

#2. Talkeetna Moose Shit Festival

OK, the people of Talkeetna, Alaska, don't call it the Moose Shit Festival. They go for the more polite but grossly misleading Moose Dropping Celebration. It's hard to imagine how many thousands of eager tourists show up ever year expecting to see moose chucked out of planes to be hilariously splattered on the rocks below, only to realize the "dropping" celebration is a festival honoring dung.

We guess that's not that much less disturbing. You'll be walking around the poop-themed decorations, when suddenly, someone yells, "Its time!" and you notice people running toward a roped-off area. And then you witness something you never thought you'd see: people betting on painted moose droppings dropped from a helicopter. People designate their piece of crap ahead of time and can win up to $1,500 if their painted and numbered turd is closest to the target.

There's more to the celebration than just the "What if helicopters could poop?" event (why have a Moose Dropping Celebration if all you're going to do is drop some shellacked shit out of the sky?). They have a Moose Dropping Toss and sell various moose-poop novelties like, um ...moose-pellet-shaped candies:

Sadly, if this article has managed to convince you to mosey on up to Talkeetna, we're going to have to disappoint you again. The Moose Dropping Celebration has not been held since 2009, and it doesn't look like it's going to be held again anytime soon. During the weekend of the 2009 festival, there was more partying than you would expect from a small Alaskan town celebrating moose feces. The celebration went overboard, drunken crowds got out of control and, uh, one person died.

At the moose-shit festival.

#1. Rapa das Bestas

Rapas das Bestas is not, as every single one of you is thinking, Spanish for "beast rape." The potential for brutal beast-related injury seems just as great, however.

The name loosely translates to "shearing of the beasts," and it is a Spanish tradition that has been going on for the last 400 years and attracts thousands of people. Wild horses from the nearby mountains are captured and herded into a corral. Once the confused and frightened animals are penned in, that's when the men get down to business: They choose a horse and dive in after it (as you see above).

GettyAlso known as the Festival of Bad Choices

Once the man wades through the mass of wild, bucking horses (sometimes they even jump from horse to horse) to the one he has selected, he attempts to wrestle it to the ground with his bare hands and shear its mane and tail.

On one hand, this absolutely does seem cruel to the horses, since they're not only forcefully herded into the tiny space, but then are roughly wrestled and shaved for no apparent reason. On the other hand, the horses seem to deliver more punishment than they take. Watch a single horse throw around three full-grown dumbasses like it's nothing:

The chaos ends whenever the horses are sheared and tagged (and presumably half of the human participants have been trampled). Then the horses are released back into the wild with one hell of a story to tell.

And stop by LinkSTORM to see how to paint your genitals in a festive manner.

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